Historically and prescriptively, it's "fathers-in-law". "Father" is the noun here, and "in-law" a modifier, and if you think about the phrase that way then it's obviously "fathers-in-law". But the phrase has become such a fixed expression these days that many or most speakers view "father-in-law" as a compound word (this is why we hyphenate it). If it's viewed this way, then "father-in-laws" becomes the correct plural form. There are other similar words with this problem, like "attorney general".

Personally, I probably use "father-in-laws" when I'm not thinking about it.

Lazar wrote:This is analogous to a term like "attorney general", where the prescriptively correct plural is "attorneys general" but most people will, based on intuition, go for "attorney generals" instead.

Attorney general is a pretty messed up word in English, anyway. The adjective comes after the noun!

But yeah, what Derek said. As a term becomes fixed in English, it begins to be treated as a noun in its own right (rather than a noun + a modifer), so things like pluralization start working on the whole term, rather than on just part of it. So both are right, depending on how you treat the term, tho pedants will try to sell you on "fathers-in-law".

Xanthir wrote:Attorney general is a pretty messed up word in English, anyway. The adjective comes after the noun!

You can thank the French for that. Really, the word makes a lot more sense when you realize that it's literally just "general (as in not specific) attorney". When I was young I always thought the word was analogous to a military rank, like "lieutenant general".

Other messed up words in this pattern to blame on the French: Surgeon general, secretary general, court martial, and notary public. All of these should, prescriptively, be pluralized by making only the first word plural.

Xanthir wrote:Attorney general is a pretty messed up word in English, anyway. The adjective comes after the noun!

You can thank the French for that. Really, the word makes a lot more sense when you realize that it's literally just "general (as in not specific) attorney". When I was young I always thought the word was analogous to a military rank, like "lieutenant general".

Other messed up words in this pattern to blame on the French: Surgeon general, secretary general, court martial, and notary public. All of these should, prescriptively, be pluralized by making only the first word plural.

I sometimes jokingly pluralize "Trader Joe's" as "Traders Joe". Most people either don't get it at all or try to point out to me why that's wrong.

Also, as a child, I parsed "notary public" as "Nota Republic". I assumed it was some company with locations you could go to to have things "notarized", whatever that meant.

Derek wrote:Other messed up words in this pattern to blame on the French: Surgeon general, secretary general, court martial, and notary public. All of these should, prescriptively, be pluralized by making only the first word plural.

Again, that is if and only if the term is being read as a "[noun] [adjective]" noun phrase. If it's instead read as just a multi-word "[noun]", then standard English rules suggest the plural marker goes on the last word. Which is "correct" is based on how you treat the term; there isn't an absolutely-correct answer. English's normal term construction just avoids the problem altogether, as it puts the noun *after* the adjective when constructing noun phrases, so it doesn't matter how you read it, the noun always picks up the plural marker.

Xanthir wrote:Attorney general is a pretty messed up word in English, anyway. The adjective comes after the noun!

You can thank the French for that. Really, the word makes a lot more sense when you realize that it's literally just "general (as in not specific) attorney". When I was young I always thought the word was analogous to a military rank, like "lieutenant general".

Other messed up words in this pattern to blame on the French: Surgeon general, secretary general, court martial, and notary public. All of these should, prescriptively, be pluralized by making only the first word plural.

I sometimes jokingly pluralize "Trader Joe's" as "Traders Joe". Most people either don't get it at all or try to point out to me why that's wrong.

Also, as a child, I parsed "notary public" as "Nota Republic". I assumed it was some company with locations you could go to to have things "notarized", whatever that meant.

"Bubbler" (with 3 syllables) was the preferred term when I was in primary school, in Sydney, Australia, several decades ago. And they were generally of the unsanitary vertical stream design. In high school, we tended to call the bubblers "the taps"; "bubbler" was a term that little kids used.

I saw this question asked on a linguistic survey that apparently was done in a now defunct forum. Whether or not "we are in five" sounds okay to you. Does anyone have any idea what this means? I have no idea what "we are in five" is even supposed to mean.

2. Do the following sentences sound okay to you? (Don't worry about "technically" correct grammar, just tell me if these sound allright in your opinion, or if you use them.)

"Yes, it's a nice street. We've just moved into number eleven." "We are in five."

"Sorry I'm late for the meeting, but I'm just passing reception. Which meeting room is it?" "We are in five."

"Are you gentlemen in any of the British security services?" "We are in [MI-]five..."

(Basically, "five" souns like a location or other 'noun' use, context being somewhat important. Although "We will be there in five [minutes]" is a common enough phrase, and doubtless there's other not-necessarily-contrived forms I've not thought of.)

Ah, yeah, at first I was like "what the hell is it even asking", but as soon as a context was provided (such as discussing room numbers), where "five" is an acceptable noun that you can be in, it makes total sense and is completely reasonable English.

Well, it's a bit of a misconception to class languages as phonetic or non-phonetic: all writing systems lie somewhere on a spectrum of phonetic opacity. For example, phonetic elements actually play an important role in the construction of Chinese characters. I don't know Chinese or Japanese myself, but I have read a fair bit about their writing systems on Language Log and elsewhere – and yes, speakers of those languages do often mix up homophonous characters when it comes to obscure words, or slang words that aren't well established in writing.

Yeah, it varies by dialect and speaker. As I said in the other thread, I say all of the words in the title with [ɒː] (my "torrent" vowel), but there are some others like "Taurus" and "saurian" which I say with [ɔɚ] (my "story" vowel).

Although I've heard "aural" pronounced more towards a trisyllabic "hour-al" (silent 'h' version of 'hour', but not necessarily the same as dialect 'our') to deliberately differentiate from "oral". Rarely (but not unknown) are the mystical outline "aura" or names "Laura"/" Lauren" similarly stressed, by native English speakers, but it would not be an unknown phoneme when used by foreigners. (Either as their native pronunciation, or caught out by an assumed version of the English one.)

Although I've heard "aural" pronounced more towards a trisyllabic "hour-al" (silent 'h' version of 'hour', but not necessarily the same as dialect 'our') to deliberately differentiate from "oral". Rarely (but not unknown) are the mystical outline "aura" or names "Laura"/" Lauren" similarly stressed, by native English speakers, but it would not be an unknown phoneme when used by foreigners. (Either as their native pronunciation, or caught out by an assumed version of the English one.)

I've heard Americans pronounce "aural" as "ahral" to deliberately differentiate it from "oral".

I don't distinguish the "story" and "torrent" vowels, and I pronounce both with a vowel somewhat higher than my "caught" vowel. Normally, the lower "caught" vowel doesn't occur before "r", but I will sometimes pronounce use it in "aural" to distinguish that word from "oral".

Although I've heard "aural" pronounced more towards a trisyllabic "hour-al" (silent 'h' version of 'hour', but not necessarily the same as dialect 'our') to deliberately differentiate from "oral". Rarely (but not unknown) are the mystical outline "aura" or names "Laura"/" Lauren" similarly stressed, by native English speakers, but it would not be an unknown phoneme when used by foreigners. (Either as their native pronunciation, or caught out by an assumed version of the English one.)

I've heard Americans pronounce "aural" as "ahral" to deliberately differentiate it from "oral".

Yup. I'm an American (Houston, Texas), I don't distinguish "story" and "torrent", and all the words in the list use that same vowel, with the exception of "aural". I learned to say it as "ahral" specifically to distinguish it from "oral".

Beginning transcribers may sometimes be confused by “ing” words, such as “thing” (/ɪŋ/ in IPA) or “sang” (/sæŋ/ in IPA). A typical question is “where is the “g”? This is a spelling illusion. Although some speakers may possibly be able to produce a "hard g" (made with full occlusion) for these examples (for example, "sing"), most talkers don't realize a final stop. They simply end with a velar nasal.

So apparently it's common for people to think words like "sing" and "thing" actually end in a [g] sound due to the "g" present in the spelling.

Yeah, in my experience it's extremely hard to get laypeople to understand that [ŋ] is a single, distinct sound rather than a sequence of [nɡ], and that it can occur in initial position in other languages.

@carlington: Most English dialects have undergone what's called ng-coalescence, causing word-final and (usually, but not always) morpheme-final [ŋɡ] to become [ŋ]. (This had the interesting side-effect of causing "singer" and "finger" to no longer rhyme.) Non-coalescence is still found in Lancashire and the English West Midlands, as well as in the NYC area – hence the eye-dialect "Lawng Guyland".

Conversely, simple [ŋ] inside a morpheme is prohibited in almost all English dialects – so foreign names that use it, like "Inge" or "Nyong'o", will be (mis)pronounced with [ŋɡ].

Beginning transcribers may sometimes be confused by “ing” words, such as “thing” (/ɪŋ/ in IPA) or “sang” (/sæŋ/ in IPA). A typical question is “where is the “g”? This is a spelling illusion. Although some speakers may possibly be able to produce a "hard g" (made with full occlusion) for these examples (for example, "sing"), most talkers don't realize a final stop. They simply end with a velar nasal.

So apparently it's common for people to think words like "sing" and "thing" actually end in a [g] sound due to the "g" present in the spelling.

It's hard to quantify such a borderline vocalisation, but whilst I don't have an actual hard-[g] sound in my voicing of it, there's definitely potential for something of a "ñ as in mañana"-cum-glottlestop, in my accent, in the 'ng' area. A sight unintentional 'throat click', maybe from the extreme rear of the tongue/epiglotis contact area; further back than where a deliberate 'g' occurs, but conceivably indistinguishable (see "gottle of gear" substitutions for the "b" sounds that a ventriloquist tries to avoid).

And more so if its not the word-end "ng", but variably so. More common in "minging" than "singing", whilst "impinging" (probably hecause of its root of "impinge" goes towards a [dʒ], I think, if I have my IPA correct.

When I was training for a TEFL course a few years back I was reading an English pronunciation guide that mentioned in most English dialects 'singer' and 'finger' don't really rhyme because of the ng coalescence in the former. It totally blew my mind; how could any one possibly pronounce singer in a way that doesn't rhyme with finger? I even checked with my flatmate and she was as incredulous as me. Anyway it turns out we were both from the relatively small Manchester - Birmingham- Stoke triangle area which maintains the g in singer. When we asked our other flatmates (Southern BrE-ers) they confirmed the non rhymingness, and we spent the rest of the evening over- and under- pronouncing the 'g's in various words. Good times.